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My experience of UX almost everywhere is 'this label gives me jurisdiction to apply my personal biases to the redevelopment of this site'. Only one company I'v

by weego 6y ago

My experience of UX almost everywhere is 'this label gives me jurisdiction to apply my personal biases to the redevelopment of this site'. Only one company I've been at had UX people who spent as much time talking with existing/possible future users to ground their ideas in genuine data as they did using and understanding the product.

dgb23 6y ago
And the "UX people" you describe were doing important work right? Maybe stuff like testing/QA, building domain knowledge, analyzing feedback, building trust with clients/users, writing specs, mockups, documentation, designing UI components etc. The thing that is useful here is this: the company you refer to understood that there needs to be people, who understand the whole process and talk to each other. The slightly annoying part is that we call them "UX people". The term doesn't acknowledge at all that they are doing important, challenging, specific things. And I get that this is about "experience" somehow, but everything is. We are so bad with terms in our industry.
- notatoad 6y ago
  >the "UX people" you describe were doing important work right? Maybe stuff like testing/QA, building domain knowledge, analyzing feedback, building trust with clients/users, writing specs, mockups, documentation, designing UI components etc. I think the frustration with "UX people" is that they aren't necessarily doing any of those well-defined things that are all part of UX, but instead doing some nebulous stuff because nobody really knows what UX means. Calling some people on the team "UX people" carries the implication that everybody else on the team (testers, customer service, documentation, ui designers, backend devs, SREs) are somehow not working on UX. Everybody on a product team is a UX person, so for somebody to only be a UX person essentially means they have no role.
  - loopz 6y ago
    UX people would ideally be like a scrum master, ie. be the person facilitating UX in teams. They end up designing in a corner stuff that takes ages to be picked up in dev, while ignoring test.

by weego 6y ago

dgb23 6y ago

And the "UX people" you describe were doing important work right? Maybe stuff like testing/QA, building domain knowledge, analyzing feedback, building trust with clients/users, writing specs, mockups, documentation, designing UI components etc. The thing that is useful here is this: the company you refer to understood that there needs to be people, who understand the whole process and talk to each other. The slightly annoying part is that we call them "UX people". The term doesn't acknowledge at all that they are doing important, challenging, specific things. And I get that this is about "experience" somehow, but everything is. We are so bad with terms in our industry.

notatoad 6y ago
>the "UX people" you describe were doing important work right? Maybe stuff like testing/QA, building domain knowledge, analyzing feedback, building trust with clients/users, writing specs, mockups, documentation, designing UI components etc. I think the frustration with "UX people" is that they aren't necessarily doing any of those well-defined things that are all part of UX, but instead doing some nebulous stuff because nobody really knows what UX means. Calling some people on the team "UX people" carries the implication that everybody else on the team (testers, customer service, documentation, ui designers, backend devs, SREs) are somehow not working on UX. Everybody on a product team is a UX person, so for somebody to only be a UX person essentially means they have no role.
- loopz 6y ago
  UX people would ideally be like a scrum master, ie. be the person facilitating UX in teams. They end up designing in a corner stuff that takes ages to be picked up in dev, while ignoring test.